1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the display of information on computer screens and more particularly to a method and system for managing a floating window on a computer screen.
2. Related Art
An application sets attributes to keep the windows in the foreground even when the windows are not active. For example, a user may need to monitor an activity on a particular application (such as the connection to a network) while working on another application. However, the fact that a given window stays in the foreground (this kind of window will be called “Floating window” in the present description) even when this window in the foreground is not active, has some drawbacks. A floating window may partially or totally hide the active window and mask therefore interesting parts of the active window. In this case, the user has some solutions such as moving the floating window in an area which does not overlap the active window. The user has also the possibility to resize the floating window to see the interesting parts of the active window. However these actions are not always convenient if, for instance, the user is entering text while the active window is in full screen mode and one or more floating windows are opened. In this case, the typed text or cursor may be hidden by the floating window. Some solutions exist but need to be implemented in the application which manages the active window. One of solutions proposed by the company APPLE is use of a procedure which sets the cursor appropriately, depending on whether a document window or modeless dialogue box is active or not. This solution has a drawback as all applications have to implement and call this procedure.
For some applications, it is interesting to keep the window associated with the application visible even when the focus is on a different application window. In the example illustrated in FIG. 1, the window corresponding to the dictionary application remains visible even when the user enters data on a different application.
The problem is that the cursor and the text that is being entered on the screen disappear behind the window of the front end application. This situation remains until the cursor leaves the front end application area. In such a situation, the user needs to close or move the front end window to see the cursor and text that is being entered.